


Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Catchclaw



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, First Time, M/M, Makeup Sex, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:44:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1364485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To win Dean Winchester, the first thing I had to do was betray him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me How You Really Feel

To win Dean Winchester, the first thing I had to do was betray him.

That's certainly how he saw my actions, anyway.

I had known it would be difficult, spilling all my sins before him, a man I considered a friend. That what I said in those moments would hurt him, wound him, and there was no question that he would be angry.

Still, the unpleasantness of that conversation surprised me.

I have never seen any creature, of heaven, hell, or earth in between, as furious as Dean was with me that night.

I could see it building in his body as I spoke, staggering to explain how and why my alliance with Crowley had seemed so logical—indeed, had appeared to be the only way forward. I expressed my regret for my choices, for their unexpected repercussions, for all of the pain I had caused, and in the circle of light and companionship there in Bobby Singer's kitchen, how ridiculous and small it all seemed.

I had never known shame in the human sense of the term, but it lit on my shoulders that night, never more so that when I looked at Dean's face where hurt and fury battled, digging dark trenches under his eyes and making them burn brighter than I had ever seen.

To his credit, I suppose, he let me choke out the whole story before he chose to unleash his tongue.

"You stupid son of a bitch," he snarled, taking two steps towards me. "What the fuck were you thinking?"

I had spent the last hour, I thought, attempting to answer that question, but I saw in the sharp flush of his face that he had not heard me.

Once he'd opened his mouth, it was as though he could not contain it, all of that emotion. He yelled at me until his voice was shredded, until there was no vehicle left for his rage.

He didn't strike me, or I him, as both of us have done in the past, when that kind of violence seemed prudent.

Instead, he screamed at me, shouted and cursed in ways no doubt meant to wound, to cut me down as deep as my actions he said, he showed me, had struck him.

He called me a liar and fool and an ass. A coward and a Judas and a bastard, a goddamn fucking bastard who'd taken stupid risks, left all of us exposed, put the world on the brink of disaster _again_ and who the fuck did I think that I was? Who’d given me the right to make those choices, choices that affected a hell of a lot of people besides me?

He was right. And I knew that. Knew I deserved every word. So I stayed silent and let him rage until his shoulders sagged, until he swayed on his knees. 

I reached for him—even in the wake of his tirade, I wished to protect him—but he flinched, held up his hand to keep me away.

Strange as it sounds, that gesture hurt more than anything he had said.

“Let me help you,” I said, more a plea than I might have wished.

His head shot up and he glared at me, a wounded animal lost in the dark. "I think you've fucking helped enough, Castiel, don't you?"

I fell back into the shadows and fled.

In the end, it was Sam who forged an uneasy peace. He spoke to us both—sharply, I suspect, if his speech to me was any indication—and laid out, in no uncertain terms, why our alliance, no matter how painful, was crucial to our survival. 

I did not wish to listen, but I knew that Sam was right.

I don’t know how he convinced Dean, but the detente that Sam forged between us proved sturdy enough for he and I to be in the same room, for us to do what we had to in order to stop Crowley from, as Bobby put it, "cracking open the Levi burrito and treating us all as dessert."

A bewildering metaphor, to be sure, but one that served its purpose.

In the end, Crowley was stayed, Raphael vanquished, and heaven's order—as much as it had ever possessed, I suppose—was, for the time being, restored.

"A happy ending," Sam called it.

Of sorts.

With the worst at our backs, even then, Dean and I did not speak, not in the familiar terms that we once had.

I spent many days mourning that loss, tucked away in a corner of heaven untouched by fire and recrimination, sheltered by allies who understood my intentions if not the choices I’d made.

I had many days alone in which to think.

And it was then, in that long time that Dean and I were apart, that I let myself know that I loved him.

There was nothing in the world to me, not heaven or earth, of any import except him, and I could not for the life of me recall when and where I’d chosen to forget that fundamental fact of my existence.

Surely, such a feeling could only be what he might have called love.

I loved him, and yet I was tormented by the twist of his face on that terrible night when I admitted to my betrayal: so much pain, pain that I put there with each of my misguided attempts to protect him.

I did not act on this knowledge, however. In truth, it was hard for me to look down and see him moving through his world without me; why was it, I wondered, he did not mourn?

Perhaps he did not share my feelings.

It was difficult for me to accept that.

Instead, I clung to the ache that his soul had burned into my Grace long, long ago, and I stayed on my side of the line, the one he had once drawn between us: the savior and the saved, the betrayer and the betrayed. I kept, as they say, my distance.

There came a day, however, when I looked around me, at my brothers and sisters still uncertain in the ways of the new world, of what heaven might yet become, and decided that there had been enough combat in my life, enough destruction and uncertainty. I found that I no longer wished to fight with him. No. Only for.

So.

I fashioned my own kind of olive branch.

When it was done, I went straight to his side, and, admittedly, my behavior at first was very—un-dovelike.

I came to him with no warning, one night after his repast, and gusted him from Bobby’s sofa without a word. He decided to supply his own.

"Cas!" he shouted as soon as we settled. My fingers still on his forehead. "What the hell?!"

"Dean," I said with a calm I did not feel. "Hello."

He shook away from me, furious, and the setting sun caught him just right, made his face go bright even under his scowl.

"Damn it, you can't just—!" he fumed, but I ducked away before his tirade could catch fire and stepped out into the meadow, the last soft curve of earth before the sweet fall of the valley below us. 

For a moment, it looked as though the trees might trap the sun in its flight, might keep it from sinking determined, inexorable, behind the hills that lay ahead. For a moment, the sky shot orange and gold deep into the valley, and, for a moment, it seemed as if the sun, that great burning flame, took pleasure in being trapped.

I heard Dean gasp—this little, wondrous sound—and then he was beside me, staring, his face fighting hard against a smile.

This is something I have always loved about Dean: his open appreciation of beauty in all of its forms. 

But I did not say that to him, then. 

I tipped my head and watched him marvel at the splendor around us. I found I was hungry for that privilege, watching him.

Starving.

Then the sun shivered, broke free of the trees' hold, and fell.

He turned to me, almost in surprise, I think, and I could see his mind working, reaching for the sarcasm that was his favorite shield.

"What's with this _Sound of Music_ shit?" he asked. 

I could tell from his tone, from the hitch of his lips, that he was deliberately making reference to some human cultural text with which I had no familiarity, and I saw it for what it was, this reference: a defensive feint.

It was not the reaction that I had expected.

I had prepared myself for shouting, perhaps even some shoving. A fist driven into my face. So this—his decision to ignore it, the shadow of our last private discussion—was interesting, to be sure.

I made no attempt to decipher it. Instead, I pinched my face and gave the expected response:

"There's no music here."

He laughed, relieved, and I had the impression that he was seizing what he saw as the upper hand in goading me into a foolish display of incomprehension.

It was a moment like many before.

He is so easy to read, sometimes. I wonder if it always like that, when you care for someone so deeply, or if it is because I have held his very being between my fingers and remade his flesh with my palms.

Perhaps it is both of these things.

He spun away from me, calling "Never mind!" over his shoulder as he turned long circles in the grass, singing something about sentient geography.

At times, though, he’s utterly a mystery to me.

I shook my head and drifted back in the grass, turned my body towards the ancient truck I'd tucked sideways in the long grass. I'd set it far enough from the valley to resist its pull, but close enough so that the lush greens of its curves were still visible.

I climbed into the truck bed, the metal still singing from its many hours in the sun. I breathed in the heat, tugged it tight into my lungs. I tasted summer in my teeth, turned it over sideways with my tongue. Waiting.

Soon enough, Dean grew tired of his game, his strange mating dance with the land, and came towards me, confusion ripe on his brow.

"What's this?" he said, suspicious.

I raised my eyebrows. "It's a truck, Dean."

He rolled his eyes. "No shit. But what's it doing here?"

"I put it here.”

"Oh," he said, blinking. "I see."

Which meant, of course, that he did not. But he did not need to. Not yet.

I held his gaze and slid out of my coat. With the sun fading, the air was sweet and soft, and I reached up and loosened my tie, too.

He mimicked me, dropping his coat and peeling off his long-sleeves. He tossed them both into the truck bed and scrambled up after, perching himself on the edge, his legs pumping beneath him as a child might on a swing.

I stood at his back, behind him, and stared down at the lines of his body: the curve of his shoulder. The arch of his neck as he stretched. The turn of his ears, pink with the heat and the sun.

All of these things I had seen before, had admired, but always from the shadows. Once I made him, again, threaded his soul together whole, I felt as if I had no right to stare, that to do so would be prideful, a testimony to all my failings as a soldier, as a warrior of God.

But that was before I knew that I loved him, and now, faced with a sin so great as that—in the eyes of some of my brethren, anyway—the sweet slick of pride in my eyes seemed such a little thing, besides.

I let myself think, allowed myself to know, that he was beautiful. A different kind of creation than those my Father had made, for Dean was born only to be broken, a good man who found sin only in death, and I was the one—I am—who saved him.

You will understand, I think, why, in that moment, I thought of him as mine.

He reached back and cupped his neck in his fingers, and I let all that I felt for him stretch inside of my body, shake its wings free of dust and ash and come all the way awake.

Perhaps he heard it, somehow, for he turned to me and smiled. "Hey," he said. "Come on. What're you doing back there, man?"

I couldn't remember the last time that I'd made him smile. I didn't trust myself to give him an answer. Instead, I let the cooler speak for me, the hiss when I cracked it open the same he made when I pressed the bottle into his hand.

"And beer, too?" he said as I perched at his side. "Damn, dude. Maybe we should fight more often, if this is the way you try to make up."

His voice was easy, shades of his old teasing, but I could hear the strain that ran beneath it. A strain for which I was in so many ways responsible.

I found that I could not look at him, then. I found solace in my own bottle, for a time.

"I owe you an apology," I said, my eyes fixed on the sky, on streaks of lavender dancing in black. "Although, in this instance, the term apology seems wholly inadequate, but I don't—I don't want to fight with you, Dean."

He hummed something tuneless in the back of his throat. "Easy way around that," he said. "Don't fucking lie to me, Cas."

I froze. "It was not my intention to—"

He turned to me, his face a flash fire. "Damn it! Didn't you hear me? Stop trying to explain. Stop making it all so goddamn complicated!" He grabbed my shoulder. "It's real easy: don't lie to me. Ever again. Not like that. Jesus, do you even know what you—!"

He stopped. Stared at me for a moment, a look that grew longer and sweeter, and what had been anger shifted, lifted like a fog from his eyes.

"No," he said finally. "You don't know, do you?"

He took the bottle from my hand and dropped it into the grass after his own. The dark fluttered around us, settled like sleep.

“Cas,” he said, certain, wet fingers over my face.

He kissed me, a little soft thing like moonlight on my lips.

"Oh," I said when he lifted his head. "Yes. I do."

I grabbed him, locked my fist in his t-shirt and knocked him over, kicked the breath out from his lungs.

"What the—?!" he gasped, but before his mouth made out the words I pushed him back, shoved his head into the metal and straddled his hips.

I had a flash of his lovely, startled face before I kissed him, slit his lips with my tongue and drove deep into his mouth.

His hand shot up around my neck and pulled, dragging me deeper, making frantic little noises that were needles in my skin, and it struck me, how much time I had wasted in worry, in dwelling on the ways I had hurt him, the ways my actions had wounded, when this was what we both had wanted all along.

For a moment, I felt heavy with grief.

But then he bit my lip and growled, this lovely leonine thing under my hands, and the catch of his nails on my neck, the fat hitch of his breath, they burned my sadness away.

"Jesus fuck," he said, that long smile in the darkness. "Tell me how you really feel."

I sat back and took his face in my hands. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry. I cannot say it enough."

He closed his eyes and pressed himself into my palms. "Then don't say it. Show me instead." 

His lips turned up, and my own were helpless but to follow.

I kissed him again, slower, turning his mouth to meet mine.

"Yeah," he breathed against my lips. "Yeah, Cas. Like that."

In time, I started moving again, matching the kick of my hips to my kisses, working myself against him as his tongue rolled over my teeth, as his fingers dug into my thighs and his cock reached for my own. 

It occurred to me then that perhaps I had overestimated the relative comfort of a truck bed as a space conducive to sexual activity, given the bruises no doubt rising on my knees, the way the metal rang with each shift in our bodies. The word "bed" was no doubt a misnomer.

Next time, though. I'd know better.

He curled his arms around me, stretched them up my back, and clawed his hands at my shoulders, all the time making this low, gorgeous sound that when our mouths parted bloomed into my name.

"Please," he panted, his grin searing my cheek. "Goddamn, baby. Please. Touch me. Come on."

He tipped his head back and let me do as I wished with him, let his mouth go slack even as his cock stiffened. He took what I gave him and begged for more, happy and shameless out there under the stars.

I let him up for air and ripped his shirt away. Spread my fingers over his chest and licked long slow lines up his neck as he moaned, curved his hands around my ass and tried to make me fuck into him faster. But I kept moving slow, so slow, sucking softly on his throat, counting the times he said my name in all its variations. Hoarding his breathless pants, greedy. Unashamed.

The sun was long since gone, the air around us starting to cool, but his body burned beneath me, around me, and I could not imagine ever being more content than to have this beautiful man in my grasp; one who was pleased, so pleased, for me to hold him down and paint my apologies into his skin, one after another after another.

So many mistakes had I made that I was sure it would take me a lifetime to do justice to them all.

"Dean," I said. Soft in his ear. "I want to fuck you."

His body flew into an arch and he choked, the need for me thick in his throat.

"Oh my god," he said. "You can't—Cas, you can't _say_ shit like that to me when you're—"

I rocked down into him again and he whined, sweet hymn of frustration.

"Like that, fuck! You keep doing that and I won't be able to—"

I raised my head. Traced his lips with my fingers until he opened his mouth, pleading, and drew me inside, sucking at my skin, his tongue flicking over my knuckles.

"Yes," I said, drowsy. "Dean. Yes," and I was so distracted by the feeling of being inside him, by watching him take me in willing and raise his eyes asking for more, for me, that I lost track of the rest of my body, of his hands on my hips, of my palm pressed into the metal beside his head, of the way his cock was shivering in his jeans as he shoved himself against me—so lost that I was surprised when he came, his teeth closing on my flesh as he groaned and went wet beneath me.

"Oh," I said. "Oh. Dean. What—?"

He sighed around my fingers and shook again, his whole body tuned into pleasure, and even in that place, one sketched by my Father's ancient design, his was the image of beauty.

He shoved my hand from his mouth and pushed at my hips, almost frantic.

"Let me see," he said, dark and insistent. "Take it out. Let me see you. Come on. Show me, Cas."

"Yes," I moaned, the sound foreign and strange in my throat. "Yes."

I reared back and his hands went right for my zipper. He was clumsy and smiling and I loved him so much I thought I would shatter.

When he pulled my cock into his fist, I was certain I would.

"God, you're pretty," he said. "Look so good in my hand. Feels so good to touch you, baby."

My body moved up in awkward time, searching for a rhythm that matched his. "Fuck," I said, ragged, as he stroked me. “ _Fuck_.”

He laughed. "Something like that," he said, voice stretching into a smirk. "But first I wanna see you come. Can you do that for me, Cas? Come all over my hand? Mark me up with your spunk? Huh? Yeah, you can. Come on. Give it to me. Show me how fucking sorry you are."

While the specifics of what he was saying were lost somewhere in translation, the gist, the filthy lick of his tone, oh. That was quite clear.

In the end, I fell apart soundless. Shot stars over his fingers, his shirt, without a word. But he still heard me, heard everything I'd tried so hard to say.

"Yes, baby," he said, his free hand drifting into my hair. "That's right. Jesus, Cas. You bastard. Love you so fucking much."

When I kissed him again, his mouth tasted of tears, but somehow, he was still smiling.


End file.
